I suspect that many people today are caught off-guard by a language that has no real notion of “compile time [error checking],” and that strives to be very permissive ... to DWIM.   There are both several different ways to say the same thing, and several idioms that look similar but that don’t do the same thing.   Unless you use strict; use warnings; you don’t get notified of errors that other languages would reject outright.   It’s certainly not as amorphous as JavaScript, but it can be off-putting.   If you came from a language with strong typing, and with a “there’s one way to do it] syntax, you will find yourself without the crutches things you are accustomed to leaning on.   You’ll write something, see that it compiles and even runs, and assume erroneously that this means it’s correct and that it’s doing what you wanted.   Then, you feel like you just got smacked in the face with a skillet.

But, quite honestly, I think that just about every programming tool out there has more-or-less the same kinks ... just, different kinks.